Fighting at Cross-Purposes: Irving Howe vs. Ralph Ellison

Dissent ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 101-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darryl Lorenzo Wellington
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Ellison ◽  
Irving Howe

Umkämpfte Zugehörigkeit

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Grabau
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Ralph Ellison ◽  
Irving Howe

»[W]hile one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as artist, choose one’s ›ancestors‹.« These words lead to the heart of a dispute between Ralph Ellison and the Dissent editor Irving Howe in the early sixties which had an impact far beyond literary criticism and scholarship. From this well documented controversy we can learn something about both the power of attributions of belonging and the art of evading them.

Alternative Readings of Bigger Thomas

2018 ◽  
pp. 64-85
Author(s):  
Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Ralph Ellison ◽  
The United States ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
States Government ◽  
Irving Howe

Bigger Thomas, one of Richard Wright’s most memorable and distinctive fictional creations, has been interpreted in vastly different ways. This is partly because readers bring to Native Son different sets of beliefs about US capitalism, about the psychology of US racism, about the spiritual resources of black communities, and about the commitments and priorities of the United States government. This chapter, by Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh, compares how Irving Howe, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright interpreted Bigger’s story. The comparison reminds us of the variety of political projects to which the story can be put to use, and the possible futures for the United States—from working-class fascism, to state-led progressivism, to black communalism, to interracial fantasies and nightmares—that Bigger’s tale can illuminate.

Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man

2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 820
Author(s):  
Robert Butler ◽  
Lucas E. Morel
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Ellison ◽  
Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Germana
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Ralph Ellison ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
Henri Bergson ◽  
Dynamic Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Racial History ◽  
The Face

Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist examines Ralph Ellison’s body of work as an extended and ever-evolving expression of the author’s philosophy of temporality—a philosophy synthesized from the writings of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche that anticipates the work of Gilles Deleuze. Taking the view that time is a multiplicity of dynamic processes, rather than a static container for the events of our lives, and an integral force of becoming, rather than a linear groove in which events take place, Ellison articulates a theory of temporality and social change throughout his corpus that flies in the face of all forms of linear causality and historical determinism. Integral to this theory is Ellison’s observation that the social, cultural, and legal processes constitutive of racial formation are embedded in static temporalities reiterated by historians and sociologists. In other words, Ellison’s critique of US racial history is, at bottom, a matter of time. This book reveals how, in his fiction, criticism, and photography, Ellison reclaims technologies through which static time and linear history are formalized in order to reveal intensities implicit in the present that, if actualized, could help us achieve Nietzsche’s goal of acting un-historically. The result is a wholesale reinterpretation of Ellison’s oeuvre, as well as an extension of Ellison’s ideas about the dynamism of becoming and the open-endedness of the future. It, like Ellison’s texts, affirms the chaos of possibility lurking beneath the patterns of living we mistake for enduring certainties.

The Radical Papers. Irving Howe

Ethics ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 319-320
Author(s):  
Stuart Gerry Brown
Keyword(s):  
Irving Howe
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